Eine Amerikanerin in München

Marijane Mayer, geboren am 27.11.1922 in Wisconsin, USA, als Mary Jane Gerth, lernte Christian Mayer, damals noch nicht Carl Amery, während seines Stipendiats in Washington, DC kennen und folgte ihm 1950 ins noch großenteils zerstörte Deutschland und in eine unsichere Zukunft als freier Schriftsteller. Sie gebar ihm fünf Kinder, bewahrte sich aber immer ein Selbstbewusstein jenseits von Hausfrau und Mutter. Neben einem Hobby als Malerin, das sie bis kurz vor ihrem Tod am 20.10.2019 verfolgte, schrieb sie u.a. einige Geschichten für Kinderbücher und ein Hörspiel für den Bayerischen Rundfunk (hier als PDF). Als Hommage an dieses Leben hier ihre Erinnerungen an Amerika.

I Remember

As I drink my morning coffee on a Munich balcony when windows of the school are open "Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?"  and the amsel swoops near the black cat on the third story windowsill inviting her to a death plunge into the court an a young man comes on to his balcony to test the dampness of the earth in his flower boxes of green foliage but no flowers only a red shirt drying in the wind and in a court a mother takes her crying child form the street door "Look, you have so many nice toys here in the sandbox" party-colored plastic toys as the wind flips darkgreen-lightgreen leaves of the birch where a woman comes onto her turquoise balcony with a cellphone "You must learn to argue it's necessary for your self-confidence" and when someone above me hangs white bedsheets full-length that block out sun and life is on the other side while "We'll take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne", I look into my empty cup "Thank God it was only coffee" and stand up to pour another.

*********

"Don't mind my father," said my eighteen year old cousin. He had heard my great uncle pound up the stairs to my bedroom and throw another, pimply-faced cousin out of the room. He was spending his vacation on the farm as I was, and we were in an annex of this large midwestern farmhouse where there were two bedrooms and a spare room with a manuel organ, chairs with puffed dark red upholstery and arm rests of polished dark wood with lion heads, tables with crotcheted doilies on which small boxes decorated with seashells stood. When I was homesick, I would sit at the organ, pump with my feet and play "Auld Lang Syne" or

"In the little old church in the valley

Where I first learnt of sorrow and joy

I can see mother there

With her head bowed in prayer

While she prayed for her wondering boy"

as the tears rolled salty into my mouth. But there was in that room, too, a wardrobe trunk similar to one I had seen in a colonial museum with a sign "Ghost Cabinet". It was this we were talking about and how we locked our doors at night when our uncle pounded up the stairs, bound into my room, grabbed my cousin by his shirt collar, threw him out of the room and slammed-closed my door. I did not move until my legs no longer held me and my eyes no longe saw the door where no american gothic uncle reappeared with black hollow eyes and soaring grey hair, a pitchfork in his hand.

Dolly and Jim were the two horses that drew the plow or the planter or the cutter or the harvester when on my vacation I brought the mid-morning lunch to the men in the fields. The lunch was always cool freshly pressed lemonade, homemade bread and smoked summer sausage. Sometimes I would show-off and use words like "idiosyncrasy personified" and my cousins would insist that I made up the words.

But to bring the milk to the cheese factory in the morning they had a small dented truck with a windshield but no glass in the doors. When I would ask Pete if I could ride along, he would require a kiss in payment. When I sometimes agreed, for me it was a payment to ride an worn black leather seats with the wind blowing in my hair, the dented aluminum milk cans rattling in the back and the dust from the road following us along the river untiel we reached the small dam shadowed by oak an elm, the road in shadow between the cam and the grey wooden platform of the cheese factory, and when we stopped the dust catching up with us while Pete with one grasp heaved the milk cans into the sun where dry dusty weeds lined the road up to the bend where came the green lawn of a white stucco villa and a naked cherub in the center of a fountain that was the scandal of the village.

Here was the opening of a fairy tale I never managed to enter perhaps because there was no one in the park, no car or coach at the terraced entrance and no one at the windows. The lawn was clipped like the green of a golf course and the house shone white and on the windows hung white drapery. Someone had abandoned a dream or the village had destroyed it or perhaps there was yet a thread of the dream if the lawn and the house and the fountain were still waiting.

Next to the white villa was the home of another great uncle. My mother remembered a summer day when she and her cousins played in the carriage, using a new whip in their fantasy game. The game became lively and in one manouver the fine whip broke. The children set the whip in its holder, balancing the pieces so that they looked whole, then ran into the orchard. They watched as the uncle went into the barn for his first new-whip-ried, watched as he reached for the whip, watched the top piece topple like a corn stalk at harvesting. Mother remembered this as a comic scene. Her punishment was negligible - no mor playing in the barn.

Uncle John was a gentle man. Did he punish his son more severely? I do not remember. What I do remember is years later as a veteran of the First World War he was admitted intermittently to a veteran's hospital to be treated for shell-shock. My father on one occasion agreed to transfer him from the hospital to Uncle John's home but with an overnight at our house because of the distance. He was given the spare room the entrance to which was through my bedroom. Because he was considered a strange but gentle person, I knew I would be considered foolish if I objected to this arrangement. In the middle of the night, afraid to close my eyes, I saw his silhouette in the door. How long did we stare at each other in the distant light of the hall until he slowly turned back into his room? The reminder of the night was an eternal night.

And yes, there was another "...auld lang syne", a woman, large with child, at supper surrounded by her nine children under an electric light, not a gaslight because her husband was interested in progress. She was tired as she held the fork half-way between plate and her thin mouth and looked out of the window where she and the children heard bells and "Should old acquaintance be forgot" from a long sleigh filled with young people, saw the horses' icy puffing and snowflakes blurring the swinging lantern. "We could do that sometime," she said and he, "Stuff and nonsense," so she put the fork onto her plate. Two months later, when the child was born, she developed fever. "You'll die if you don't go to the hospital," said her aunt and the answer, "I want to die." Took the baby with her in her arms as she lay in the casket while her husband led the rosary, "The fourth sorrowful mystery, the carrying of the cross" and the nine children knelt. His stare kept one of his daughters on her knees until she lerned to stand but only until her wedding.

The family lived in a large house on the outskirts of Racine, Wisconsin, where the widower, my grandfather, had enough ground and domestic animals to cover the needs of his large family.. This way he was sure of the quality of their food.

After the death of his wife his mother and father moved into the large house to help care for the nine children. His father had owned a flour mill but sold it after discovering a bookkeeper had falsified entries to his own advantage. This shattered his trust so thoroughly that instead of hiring a new bookkeeper he sold the mill and bought a combined tavern and grocery store that he and his wife serviced alone. She was known to keep in trust the payday purchases of a heavy drinker before sending him home. Next morning the grateful wife would appear to fetch the new shoes or groceries of textiles. She also was the midnight angel in her white gown and broom who appeared at the top stair of their living quarters to announce closing time for late customers. But for all that she was a small, plump, gentle women, a little hard of hearing, loved by the children of her only child.

Now I'd like to tell a story the widower liked to tell of how he bought from J.T., a local manufacturer of farm maschinery (sic, passiert mir auch immer wieder wenn ich als Deutscher Englisch schreibe) and cars, bought a trotter, a one-time winner who had gone lame. He massaged that horse with patience for weeks until it was ready and then harnessed it to the sulky, rode out to the half-mile track and timed his arrival on the road parallel to the racetrack as the trainer of the new J.I. thoroughbred rounded the bend. "Yep, I beat him." Then he laughed his high dry laugh.

Later, much later each home of his children with their many children received a bushel of russet apples he brought back in fall from Oregon on the train after visiting the farmer who rented the acres he owned there. The yellow-brown, rough-skinned apples were the fruithoard of the grandchildren , plundered in winter nights when the boys read "Treasure Island" and the girls "Little Women" -- and, yes, plundered as snacks for sleighrides.

Apples and venison in fall. The venison, not every year but almost, came after the russets. One year as he tipped his chair in the warm kitchen of a daughter, he told of a buck that had evaded hunters and him, too, the year before. This year he studied the buck's habits before mounting a sheltered hillock at dawn with the wind in his face, waited until the antlers showed at the crown of the neighboring hillock at dawn with the wind in his face, waited until the buck stood majestic at the top when he majestetically raised his rifle. "Bang", and then laughed his high dry laugh.

Another year as he tipped his chair in the warm kitchen he told an incident from his three-month tour of Europe. In Tyrol an innkeeper who did not realize he could speak German tried to overcharge him. An "He He He" he laughed again as he recalled the customs officer in New York who did not notice he was wearing a silk European suit under his regular suit. The rosaries blessed by Pope Pius XI were no doubt tax free but I am not sure how he managed the perfumes from Paris bought for his daughter and daughter-in-law probably on the advice of the priest friend with whom he traveled, a priest friend who enjoyed his claret.

But grandfather was not amused by the abundance of naked statues he confronted in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Why, I do not know, but in preparation for their European tour, he and Father Bott were invited to the home of one of the industrialists in our town. They went with the presumption that he intended to contribute financially. Grandfather smiled as though he was about to tell a good joke when he presented us with the gift they had received -- a supply of the industrialists product, malted milk tablets that furnished our household for years.

In Eruope there had been no language problem as Father Bott spoke French, a language grandfather found impossible, whereas he claimed a ready affinity to Italian due to Latin in Mass. German he spoke well despite the fact that he had been born in the United States, contrary to my fathers parents who hardly spoke German although they had been born on Germany. The latter had settled in Chicago.

My grandfather was of wiry build, not tall, an energetic walker who, as long as he had his own home, usually owned an aggressive dog. He would tip his chair in the warm kitchen while he waited for me to finish my breakfast so we could walk together to daily mass. For someone whose stomach did not open until about 11 o'clock the bacon and egg my mother fried for me in an attempt to counter my underweight was a misery in addition to the impatient drumming of grandfather's fingers upon the table.

He often spoke of difficulty with his sinuses an hemorrhoids and when I asked him what hemorrhoids were he told me to ask my mother, which I did not.

Before entering a home for seniors he lived with us several years, years of stern comic strip control for my sister and me. The Sunday paper had pages of colored strips that we tried to capture before grandfather threw them into the furnace. And I who liked to see a movie on Sunday afternoons would think of excuses for my absence which I think he seldome believed but quietly decided to let me win on this point.

His last car was a grey roadster he sold shortly after an accident where he complained he would have "told off that whippersnapper young driver of the other car if I had been driving on the right side of the road". But then using our family car was an added problem. When he bought gasoline he expected the gauge to show the same amount the next time he decided to use it.

He entered a small home for men run by a religious order, and when after years the order felt compelled to raise the original ridiculously low monthly payments, grandfather refused to pay on the grounds apparently of "a contract is a contract".  My mother and her brothers and sister quietly arranged to pay the additional costs. When grandfather no longer received requests for higher monthly payments, he announced his victory to whomever wanted to hear about it. But he did win over the rule of the house that doors be locked at at a specific time when all were to be accounted for. Grandfather insisted upon having his own key and enventually was given one.

In his autocratic way he remained interested in his family and contributed financially in difficult situations, even helping his grandchildren. To his own children as a wedding present he gave a down-payment on a house, but the house chosen had to meet his approval. When I was shown the one my parents had selected and that had not met his approval . When I was shown the one my parents had selected and that had not met his approval, I blessed his interference.

Grandfather was in a nursing home the last years of his life before he died at 98 and I imagine the pain of his helplessness during his short hours or minutes of recognition. The newspaper announcement of his death listed also his membership in the Apostolate of Suffering. Since then I have wondered what his secrets were.

His daughter Rose never married. She was a rose with red-blond hair, brown eyes, and white skin with a small sprinkling of freckles. In the new home in town she kept house for her father and two brothers who married later. Her father who was interested in progress had been among the first telephone customers in town and had bought one of the first cars produced by J. I. Case. Now he bought an washmachine that had to be cranked and sometimes helped cranked the swirl in the wooden tub.

Rose washed and starched and ironed, sewed, embroidered dresses for her nieces, roasted venison and pheasant, turkey and chicken, fried trout and pike, baked cheese cake and chinese chews, refrigerator applesauce cake, custard pies and fruit pies with latticed tops, canned freshly picked fruits from boats crossing Lake Michigan in the night, pickled crabapples and pears. She vacuumed oriental rugs and brushed wine-red upholstery, dusted oak cases and windowseats, polished varnished floors and aired the den where her father smoked his pipe as he played cribbage with a nephew whose passage he had paid from Germany. He He He her father would laugh when he won again --- against the wise nephew.

But the brightest room in the house was Rose's bedroom in the morning when the sun on the floor was colored by pink voile curtains and the sun on her high broad bed illuminated the white embossed spread. On the cherrywood dresser stood a picture of her mother framed in the center of a glass star.

When the household was dissolved Rose came to live with us. I think she looked forward to the day or two every week when she assisted in the household of the priest who had accompagnied her father to Europe. She enjoyed the quiet elegance of that household and the friendship of the priest's three sisters. Of the two dollars per day she received in payment, twenty-five cents were secretly put into a drawer of my desk.

Rose was forty when she met a widowed ward healer (sic, sollte wohl ward heeler heißen) with an eight year old daughter, but her sister my mother thought the ward healer unacceptable. Rose died of cancer several years later.

The wise nephew who had lost almost every game of cribbage with grandfather in the 1930's, returned to visit his relatives in upper Bavaria after the Second World War. He had sent Care-packages but discovered that those to his mother had often been stolen by the other relatives, so he supplied a butcher friend with dollars who promised to deliver regularly at least meat to the mother.

(I remember another account of a first visit in Europe after the war. A foreman known as The Swede who worked for my father celebrated his entire visit with relatives reinforced with American alcohol --- around a card table.)

One daughter to the joy of the widower became a nun. She painted flowers and windmills but most of all she was an accomplished pianist and worked to become an accomplished violinist before assignment as a music teacher in a parish grade school. During the convent recreation hours when a walk in the walled garden was prescribed, she used the time for extra practice and substituted a wide open window in the night for her fresh air. During an arctic winter she caught pneumonia and died at the age of 22.

The men who courted two daughters had not been welcomed by the widower. One daughter was courted clandestinely, the other openly by a young man who defied the vicious yard dog. It was he who many years later the palsied widower would visit, walking about in the room until his son-in-law finally asked, "Should I shave you, Dad?"

The wife of the clandestine lover was plagued by migraine. She dyed her hair red and wore a white band around her forehead. Her lover was inventive evon as a suitor, high-jacking a hand trolley from the railroad to see her when he visited a relative fifty miles away, later establishing a lucrative business that bent chrome or much later constructing a a boat with a propeller airplane motor that skimmed a river and was constantly in danger of either capsizing or rising above the water.

One son left for work, or adventure, on a western ranch and upon returning settled down to marriage and a large family. But one night, however the connection, he armed himself to guard a boxcar of prohibition liquor that had been accidentally sidetracked, an incident that interfered with his promotion as a bank clerk.

My first memory of the presence of death is a large black oval-framed picture of the oldest son of John as he lay in his casket. Before him burned a red vigil light in a dimly lit room. Ambros, 18 years old, had been accidentally shot by a boy next door with a gun that had not been secured after a hunting trip of the men in his family. The boy had found the guns in the basement as Ambros appeared at the top of the stairs, raised one of them playfully and pulled the trigger. I never understood why the boy had been forced by his father to save a flower from the grave of my cousin.

When I was readying myself for the hospital, for the birth of our fifth child, my husband with shaving soap on his face said, "I know what his name is -- Ambros". He had no knowledge of the existence of this cousin. When Ambros passed his eighteenth year without mishap, I relaxed.

When my father's mother came to live with us after her husband's death, she became a convert to Catholicism, the faith that was expected in my mother's family where there were two conversions before marriage to an eligible Kosterman. My father had been one and my Aunt Clara who married Edward was the second.

Aunt Clara was for me as a child an unusually independent woman when I heard of her daring move to bring her husband Edward back as a practicing Catholic. Uncle Ed had begun to omit attendance at Sunday Mass, so Aunt Clara followed his example. When he asked her why she no longer went to mass on Sunday she answered "Why should I? You don't." The whole Kosterman clan heald his breath. Uncle Ed, who felt more responsibility for Clara's soul than for his own, returned the church and Clara with him.

This was perhaps the incident that gradually set Aunt Clara and her family apart from the rest of the Klostermans with whom they had less contact than was wont between the brothers and sisters, contacts that flourished or flickered, someitmes ending with loud disputes.

A strict practice of the self-understood faith in the Kosterman family was particularly evident on the farm of my great uncle and not only on his farm. The entire German community, for instance, would wait expectantly for the pastor's word during Mass which released them from the obligation of Sunday rest so that they could bring in the hay or grain harvest threatened by rain, a situation that could save or ruin a marginal farm.

My great-grandfather was not the only one to set up a business first as a miller, then as a grocer. There were two other distant relatives as grocers in Racine during my time. While the mill was operating, there were relatives further north as barrelmakers. On one occasion they floated their wares along the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan, destination: the meat packers of Chicago. The railroads had asked an exorbitant price for transportation.

But that is only on-half of my family.

My father's mother, Emma Schroeder, the oldest of four children, three girls an a boy, came to America at the age of nine. Her father had left for the States, leaving his family in Germany with the promise to send for them as soon as he was established financially. As time passed with no word to join him, his wife sold their bakery near Berlin, bought a sack of dried fruit, sailed for New York, boarded a train for Chicago where she, surrounded by their four children, knocked on her husband's door.

My grandmother lost a desire for dried fruit the rest of her life.

May and Willie, my grandmother's two sisters, married successful Chicago businessmen. They were short, well-built women who wore supports that thinned their waistlines an propped up their bosoms. They bought expensive dresses on trial, wore them at an evening party and returned them next day to the store. They wore high-heeled shoes as size too small and kicked them off when they came home, "These damn shoes." They were tellers of tales and could turn even a funeral into a feast, all in all, a temperament that could inform a husband they were staying 'til nine although the husband had wanted to leave at seven.

When my mother occasionally disagreed with Dad, he might laugh and say, "You mean we're staying 'til nine."

My grandmother was less volatile. She gave up the young man of her choice because he reminded her father of the son who had left the family, adress unknown.

This grandfather of mine was tall with large strong features and a quiet voice. The family, including my father and his sister Lola, a black-haired olive-skinned almost-beauty, left Chicago for Racine where grandfather took a job in a luggage company that promised extra remuneration for his designs. This promise was never kept and he eventually returned to Chicago. A valise design of his was widely copied and Peggy my sister has one of them.

As Dad's assembly lines (see below, he was a foreman at Nash motors) were part of final testing, he had the opportunity or took the opportunity one year to test the coming model on the Indianapolis Speedway. He enjoyed all difficult manipulations of a car, for instance, on an icy street, and with patience taught his children all he knew. He was proud of the Nash cars he built but was shocked the year an Italian was hired to re-design it. Dad had many Italians on his lines and knew them primarly as "pasta eaters". "What? An Italian?" he exclaimed. "What are they hiring an Italian for?"

His disciplinary tendency, at home more felt by his wife than his children, was balanced by a sense of humor that did not leave him even when he pressed a well-worn trouser so thoroughly that as he held it up the legs fell into four parts.

But he lost his sense of humor when after weeks of inner hesitation mother decided not to wait another month or two for him to fulfil a promise but hired a company to install a filter in the pipes of our well so that the sheets and undercloths would finally show white instead of an iron yellow. That day I remember Dad entered the kitchen and announced that he would install the filter the following Saturday. Mother swallowed and said, "It's in already." He left the room in barely controlled rage after exclaiming, "You make a fool out of a man."

I remember another, but more subtle rebellion. Dad's favorite color was orange and in this color he owned a pair of socks. Mother found these socks impossible and mended only the first holes but, contrary to her thriftiness, did not mend the second round of holes.

Bargaining was Dad's sport not only when shopping for an automobile or house equipment. In his retired years when they lived on Blue Lake and then Carr Lake in northern Wisconsin, he would grocery shop with mother. I remember how on one occasion he picked out a slightly spoiled cucumber . She, who guessed his intentions, walked to the opposite side of the store.

But bargaining on a union basis was against Dad's convictions. He did not consider the workers capable of grasping the problems of production and those who were able to verbalize he considered close to or under the influence of the communists. My sister and I always found ourselves in these cases on the same side in defense of unions: "Do you think the manufacturers of their own accord would ever have improved working conditions?"

Dad always remained true to his word. So it was when he promised his father-in-law to return to the hometown as soon as a job there was available and when he told me as I left for Germany, "If you want to see me again, you'll have to come here. I'm not visiting you."

A Bushel of Dirt

("You have to eat a bushel of dirt before you die," my Mother said and shook her head as she sent me into the kitchen garden again to stop my baby brother.)

We were playing baseball in the empty lot when a white propeller plane sounded high up in the hazy blue sky. We stopped playing to watch it turn slowly and return in the direction it had come.

"Hey, Lindy, give me a ride," shouted my young brother (Anspielung auf Charles Lindbergh)

"Hey, Lindy, give me a ride," we all shouted.  "Hey, Lindy," we kept shouting until it was out of sight.

"OK, let's play ball," yelled the captains. That is why we always chose Junior and James as captains. They had the strongest lungs.

My brother started to walk away . He was still looking in the direction the plane has disappeared.

"Get over to third base where you belong," Junior commanded him. Wallace kept walking. "Quittter," yelled Junior. "Quitter. Quitter. You're not in my team for the rest of the week." Wallace kept walking. "For the rest of the summer."

We all quit after one more inning, because the sun was high and hot. I walked home and down into the basement where we had a room for hot days. Wallace was sitting at the table cutting out pieces for a new airplane model. The red Japanese paper was lying on the floor. He did not hear me come in. I watched him cut with a single-edged razor blade the pars for his double wings. Then I got my book and began to read. Upstairs my mother was vacuuming the rugs.

In July and August the factories in our town had their picnics -- the automobile factories, the malted milk manufacturers, the printing company, the tannery. There was the great lake on whose shore we lived and then there were the smaller lakes all within an hour's drive. At one of these picnic was usually held because there were rowboats for the children and swimming was not as dangerous and the water not as cold as in the great lake.

But the main attraction was the barnstormer. The barnstormer had a plane with two open cockpits, double wings and one engine. The stubble in the freshly cut grain field whished to the ground in waves as the plane landed. He climbed out from behind the controls, stepped onto the lower wing and jumped down onto the ground. He pushed his goggles up to his leather helmet an then walked, in leather riding pants and boots, to the shade of the red barn where the men were waiting with their wives and children. The children pulled loose from the hands of their mothers and ran to the plane. My brother stood next to my father and waited. One dollar for a ride This was depression and most of the men on the assembly lines could not afford this. Children whose fathers were foremen or skilled workers were privileged. My father gave the pilot two dollars.

When they returned after fifteen minutes in the air, I ran with my little sister to meet them and asked my brother how it was. He did not answer. I would have to find out for myself.

"Can I fly, too, Daddy?"

"That's enough for today," he said.

Aunt Rose heard me ask. "We two will go up," she said. Everyone looked at us. We were the only females to fly that day. And because the pilot did not extra helmets for passengers, my aunt and I spent a hour combing the snarls out of our hair when we returned.

But I thought I knew why may brother had to fly as I later knew why he looked above the sails of his boat to the point from which the earth had a new meaning, the earth with its trees and rivers and homes that lay in a pristine anticipation of dwellers who could live free of strain and antagonism. Wether these were his thoughts?

Barnstorming was over when the second world war started. Wallace was in high school and during a summer vacation he had a job in a sport shop. When he returned from word, he was tired and depressed. The shop was owned by a man who was a disorganized penny-pincher. He tried to talk personally to all customers, regardless of the clerk who was waiting on them. He sold out-dated equipment for the price of newer equipment. He promised shipments for the next day of articles that had not as yet been ordered and hoped that the next day the customer would buy something, anything.

After a week my brother discovered his sense of humor. We all looked forward to supper when he would dramatize his experiences at work. "Yes sir," he would boom, "a dissatisfied customer who buys is better than a satisfied customer who waits."

Six weeks later Wallace quit his job at the sport shop.

"I'm buying a sailboat," he said after a vacation with friends.

"With what?" asked my father.

"With $100."

"A sailboat for 100 dollars?"

"I'll fix it up."

"Where?"

"We'll take it home on our trailers."

"So?" said my father as he puffed on his short cigar. A week later he was puffing on another short cigar as he waited on the pier. My brother's dog was sitting in the helm of the rowboat as Wallace and a friend towed a moulding grey mass an docked it on the pier.

"Hm," said my father. "Hm," he said again as one half of our double garage filled with a disassembled sailboat.

"How are you ever going to get it together again?"

"I've got it all up here," my brother answered and pointed to his head.

My father laughed at what he thought was my brother's sense of humor. But he kept the kerosene stove filled and burning in the garage as Wallace worked on the boat that winter. When spring came, he was talking with his son as an equal.

The glossy white boat was launched, and when I had my turn to sail with Wallace, I followed his eyes as he looked beyond the mast to the clouds gliding with a spring wind.

It was the Korean War. After a series of written tests, Wallace appeared before a board of air force officers for a personal interview. "When was the last time you wet your bead?" The cord or the nearby telephone ripped out of the wall as Wallace banged the phone onto the table before the board. "Ask my mother." Then he slammed the door as he left the room to pack his suitcase.

"I blew my chance," he said at home, but a letter soon arrived from the air force with instructions to report for duty.

It was ten degrees below zero the day he left. My sister waited with him on the platform, collars turned up to the eyes that looked down the steel tracks for the light of the early train. And when she stood alone, she watched the snow-dust swirling up behind the receding coaches. She said.

"That must be Wallace calling from Texas," said my mother. She jumped up from the rocking chair, I suppose where she was praying a rosary.

"Hello, Wallace, how are you? Did you get the package of brownies? How many did you get to eat?" She laughed loud, I'm sure.

My sister said, "Let me talk, too. Hi, Wallace. This is Saturday night. Aren't you going out? So, so. Shooting the breeze. You mean, you're putting on a one-man show again." She laughed loud, "I'm sure."

Then mother. "Your dog hasn't eaten for a couple of days. Why don't you say hello to him?  Maybe that will help. Here, Dinny. Come here, boy. Talk to him, Wallace. Do you hear him, boy? He's all excited."

Dinny smelled along the rug to the door, he ran down the basement stairs, he ran up and into the bedroom. Two days later, Dinny died. He was an old dog by that time, they said.

In the cantine someone baited Wallace. "You're chicken the way you fly that plain."

"I'm careful, said my brother. "I like life,"

"You're chicken," he repeated.

Wallace stood up. "Follow me."

"What do you mean?"

"Follow me," Wallace repeated. "All the way."

He tried, as Wallace stunted his training plane in endless dives, climbs, turns and loops. Through the intercom: "OK, you win, Wallie."

"Just two more weeks," said my mother, "and Wallace will have his air force wings. When he comes home on leave we'll have to drive up to Grandpa. And maybe we should invite Doug for the weekend. I think I'll wash the curtains in his bedroom an surprise him with a new spread on his bed."

She was busying her thoughts as a housewife to cover up her fears. After completion of his training Wallace was to be sent to Korea. He had only wanted to fly and now he thought about deflecting to Canada. Mother prayed every morning and evening as she sat in her rocking chair, rosary in hand, her eyes closed, her lips movine and now and then nodding her head to underline her intensity: "Please save Wallace from the war. And Canada."

My sister Peggy was waiting with my father at the railroad station two weeks later when Wallace came home. The air force officer helped lift the coffin out of the box car and carry it to the waiting hearse.

"Watch your father so that he doesn't open the casket," the funeral director told my sister. The next day my father's car was missing toward evening. Peggy reached him as he started to unscrew the lid. She threw her arms around the whole body and pleaded with what words I do not know until he became weak with a flood of memories.

Many miles away, near the white villas and naked statues, as I picked raspberries in the garden, an air force plane ripped open the air above me. I dropped my basket and the red berries rolled into the dust.

About the Author

To get this straight from the beginning, I the author am writing this and not my publisher. Of course one way or the other About the Author is carpenter gothic but I prefer my carpentry to his. So -- I was born probably about 1866 somewhere in the middlewest although I could say I was born about 1840. Women have the tendency to be born with their mothers if not their grandmothers. In my case I hope you have noticed, it is my great grandmother.

I've been borning and dying for over a century now, always floating a yard or two above the assembly particularly at the funeral. Now how to get me down and into that casket when my time comes? When anticipating my own death I'm still a yard or two above it all.